California School Board Rejects Rocketship Charter School

Last Thursday, the Alum Rock school district, part of metropolitan San Jose, California, voted to reject a charter school application from the Rocketship chain of schools. As I detailed in a recent paper, Rocketship’s model, which relies on cheaper, inexperienced teachers and completely replacing teachers with computer applications for a significant part of the day, is being promoted for poor urban children, but is dismissed as inadequate by more privileged families.

Rocketship is based in the San Jose area, and thus the Alum Rock rejection represents a rebuff in the part of the country with the most first-hand experience of their methods.

While Rocketship proposed to serve students from schools that had failed to make Adequate Yearly Progress under the federal No Child Left Behind Law, its application failed to mention that nearly all of Rocketship’s San Jose schools have themselves failed to make Adequate Yearly Progress for at least two years in a row.

Rocketship’s statement to investors proclaimed that “no assurance is given” that Rocketship schools will make Adequate Yearly Progress in future years.

Because Rocketship students spend a large portion of their day in computer labs with no licensed teacher, 4th and 5th graders will not receive the minimum instructional hours required by law.

Rocketship was “misleading” in not including Learning Lab students in its calculation of student-teacher ratio. When all students are counted, “the true student/teacher ratio is, in fact, 37 students to 1 teacher.”

While the Alum Rock district itself spends less than 6% of its budget on central overhead, Rocketship requires each school set aside 15% of its budget for the corporate headquarters. “Understanding the aggressive growth model for Rocketship as a national organization,” Alum Rock staff wondered how a local school would be supported.

Finally, Rocketship encourages low-income students to be passive rather than active users of technology. The Alum Rock district Rocketship’s model fails to provide “common core digital proficiencies,” including “understanding of the concepts underlying hardware, software, and connectivity” and “the ability to use technology for research, critical thinking, problem solving, decision making, communication, collaboration, creativity, and innovation.”

Ultimately, the school board decided that, in the words of its president, “If you’re a struggling model that’s having issues, why would we go ahead and say let’s go with these folks?”

In short, school district staff noted many of the same problems that EPI’s research identified, and arrived at similar concerns.

There are good and bad schools of every type, including charter schools. But all schools must be held accountable. Education policy must not be based on the assumption that there are different definitions of quality education for poor and privileged students, and should not promote a model for poor children that wealthier parents reject as substandard for their own families.

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EPI is an independent, nonprofit think tank that researches the impact of economic trends and policies on working people in the United States. EPI’s research helps policymakers, opinion leaders, advocates, journalists, and the public understand the bread-and-butter issues affecting ordinary Americans.